WordPressThis is not a WordPress plugin.
There is no .zip, nothing in the plugin repository, and no free tier. If you came looking for a free popup plugin, Popup Maker is the honest answer and it is one search away. If you are still here, the rest of this page is the case for a hosted script instead.
Two things to check before reading on.
- It is a script tag. One line in your header, then everything is configured in our dashboard. Nothing to update in WP Admin, and nothing that breaks on a core upgrade.
- It starts at $100 a month for up to 20,000 unique monthly visitors. The popular WordPress plugins have free tiers. We do not.
Plugin or hosted script?
One of these three answers is “plugin”.
A plugin runs in your WordPress
Which means it can read your posts, your users and your WooCommerce orders directly, and it costs nothing extra to host. It also means it is another plugin to keep updated, another thing that can conflict on a PHP upgrade, and another entry in your Core Web Vitals budget.
A hosted script runs on our infrastructure
One tag in your header, and every change afterwards ships from a dashboard without touching WordPress. Nothing to update, nothing to break on a core upgrade, and the same setup works if you later add a Shopify store or a marketing site on a different stack.
Multi-site and multi-platform
If your WordPress site is the only thing you run, a plugin is the simpler answer. If it is one of several properties — a WooCommerce store, a Shopify shop, a landing-page domain — one hosted capture layer across all of them beats maintaining a plugin on each.
The WooCommerce caveat.
A plugin running inside WordPress can read WooCommerce order and cart data directly. A hosted script cannot, so cart-value and product-level targeting are weaker on WooCommerce than they are on Shopify, where the app embed gives us that context. If those conditions are central to what you are planning, a WooCommerce-native plugin is the better tool and this page would rather you knew now.
WordPress popup questions.
Two of these answers point at a free plugin.
No. There is no plugin in the WordPress repository and no .zip to install. BetterPopup is a hosted script — one tag in your site header, added through your theme's header settings or any header-and-footer-scripts plugin — and everything after that is configured in our dashboard rather than in WP Admin.
Yes, several, and they are the honest answer if free is the requirement. Popup Maker is the most-installed option in the WordPress repository and has a free tier; it ranks first for this search for good reason. BetterPopup has no free plan at all, so if you are choosing on price, start there rather than here.
Paste the script tag into your site header. Most themes have a header scripts field; if yours does not, a header-and-footer-scripts plugin does it in one step. After that, popups are built, targeted and published from the dashboard — you do not go back into WordPress to change anything.
The popup runs on the storefront and can target by page, by traffic source, by device and by whether someone has already subscribed. It does not read WooCommerce order data directly the way a plugin can, so cart-value and product-level conditions are weaker here than on Shopify. If deep WooCommerce integration is central to your plan, a WooCommerce-native plugin will serve you better.
The script is 13 KB of JavaScript arriving in under 5 KB compressed, loads asynchronously and renders after your content, so it does not block rendering. That compares favourably with a PHP plugin that adds queries to every page load — but a plugin you have already tuned may well be fine, and this is not a reason to switch on its own.
When your email stack is more than one tool. One popup writing a confirmed signup into all 6 connected providers at once — Klaviyo, Omnisend, Mailchimp, Attentive, Postscript, Drip — with suppression that knows about all of them, is a job most WordPress popup plugins do not attempt. If you run one list on one site, a free plugin is the better call.